me and Siobhan’s not speaking to me and our au pair probably isn’t speaking to me, and I have one of my little girls upstairs vomiting and I just feel . . . bad about myself. And confused. I’m looking at my life and I’m saying, What happened? What am I doing? How did I get here? Do you ever feel that way?”
“All the time,” Matthew said. “It’s fair to say I feel that way all the time.”
“But you’re a big star,” Claire said. “Nobody gets mad at you.”
“Bess is mad. She’s beyond mad. She’s finished. My band is mad. Terry and Alfonso—they’re disappointed and mad, and they have every right to be. I’m letting them down. I’m a big star, but guess what: I’m also a seriously flawed person. I can write songs and sing and play the guitar, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have weak spots and bad days like every other human being. We all fail, Claire.”
She was crying again. “I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you, too,” he said.
“I have to hang up, but I’m going to see you, right? In August? You’ll stay here with us?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You have to stop drinking,” she said. “Just stop for one hour. Do you want me to call Bruce?”
“He knows all about it,” Matthew said. “He’s on his way over here as we speak.”
“You have to be sober for my concert, Matthew,” she said. “For me, okay?”
“For you,” he said. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Claire said. She hung up the phone and spent a moment enjoying the sun on her arms. She was feeling pain about the past twenty-four hours and pain from twenty years earlier. She was as confused now as she’d been then; the world and the people in it perplexed her. She perplexed herself.
“Mommy?”
She went inside.
The vacation could have gone either way. Lock and Daphne were alone for eight days and seven nights; things could have gotten better between them, or worse. They had taken two other vacations alone together since Daphne’s accident, one to Kauai, one to London, and neither had done the trick, but there was always the lingering hope that this time would be different. This time the sunshine or the pool or the amenities of the world-class resort would inspire the change Lock had been waiting for. Daphne would snap (!) back into her old self; she would break out of the spell cast on her by her head injuries and wake up, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. Where have I been all this time?
In the end, the vacation didn’t go one way or the other. Things between them remained the same. Which meant what? The two days at Andover were torture. Heather didn’t want them there. She asked them to meet her off-campus, at a vegetarian restaurant in town. There were other students in the restaurant, some of whom waved to Heather and murmured her name, but Heather did not introduce Lock or Daphne to anyone. Lock couldn’t say he blamed Heather, because Daphne, especially in front of people she had never met, was unpredictable. She began by harassing their waitress about her hair, which was knotted in dreadlocks.
“A nice white girl like you,” Daphne said, only seconds after ordering a leek and Gruyère tart, “sabotaging your looks with that awful hair. You don’t wash it, is that it? What do your parents say?”
The waitress chose to ignore Daphne; she flushed as she scribbled down Lock’s and Heather’s orders, and then she fled from the table while Daphne, inexplicably, clucked like a chicken. Heather glowered, mortified.
“Mom,” she said. “Quit it.”
“Quit what?” Daphne said. “I just wonder what her parents think.”
Lock tried to serve as a buffer between his wife and his daughter; he tried to shield Heather from Daphne’s attacks, but Daphne landed a few jabs anyway. Heather’s calves were too muscular, Daphne said. You look like a boy. You should think about quitting hockey next year.
“But Mom,” Heather said, “hockey is why I’m here.”
“You don’t want to turn into a lesbian, do you?” Daphne said. “I don’t want you to turn into a lesbian.”
“All right,” Lock said. “That’s enough.”
Heather seemed happier when it was just her and Lock alone, after Daphne went back to the inn to “rest.” Heather took Lock onto campus, introduced him to her art history teacher, showed him her dorm room, where he visited with Heather’s roommate Désirée, whose parents had kindly taken Heather to Turks and Caicos. Désirée’s parents also had a house on Martha’s